What Underachieving Middle School Students Believe Motivates them to Learn

Chapter 1: The Challenge to Educate Everyone Chapter 2: A Review of Literature Chapter 3: Methods Chapter 4: The Results Chapter 5: Discussion      An Emerging Theory        Experience        Meaning        Motivation        Environment        A Complex System        Implications      A Gap in Schools      Getting in the Way?      A Final Thought References Appendixes Biography

An Emerging Theory   The real problem facing educators is helping all students achieve optimal learning (conceptual understanding and the ability to apply knowledge to new problems, learning, and creations) with high quality content (from the students own interests, from state and local curricula, and national standards). If we are serious about educating every child, we must include every child in meaningful, engaged learning. That means using teaching techniques that match what we know about how kids learn. All four students in the current study had clear ideas of how they learned well, what they liked and disliked about how their teachers teach, and what recommendations they would make about changing schools in ways that would help them learn better. This is also true of the two students in the pilot study. This suggests that much can be learned by continuing to add studentsí voices to the discussion of how to motivate underachieving middle school students. The two studies share similar conclusions about what motivates underachieving middle school students. The four key motivators that these students value are a positive relationship with the teacher, hands-on work and doing things, choices, and attention to learning styles and individual differences. Synthesizing these findings with the literature on learning and motivation (see Chapter II), a theory for meaningful, engaged learning begins to emerge. There are four key components: experience, meaning making, motivation, and the learning environment.

	Web site created by Mike Muir Send questions or comments to wilder@somtel.com Last updated April 25, 2001	Mike Muir Assistant Professor of Education University of Maine at Farmington 104 Main Street Farmington, ME 04938 207.778.7179 wilder@somtel.com http://violet.umf.maine.edu/~mmuir